For much of the last century, Nimbin, a village of roughly 1600 inhabitants near the NSW border with Queensland, abided an unremarkable farming existence at the teat of the dairy industry. It was a picturesque town situated in a densely forested valley, ripe for cosmopolitan discovery. This finally happened in 1973, when the Australian Union of Students relocated its Woodstock-esque Aquarius Festival from east coast metropoles to the misty hinterland, giving birth to Nimbin as we know it today: the “alternative lifestyle capital” of Australia.
It’s a civic history plucked straight from conservative nightmare or liberal fantasy, depending on which way you look at it. Legend has it that many Aquarians stayed on after the scheduled 10 days to populate the outback commune of their dreams.
That the festival was never resurrected after 1973 appears to confirm this, but even though the lifespan of Aquarius was shorter than most Shannon Noll tours, another festival soon materialised to take its place.
Nimbin MardiGrass celebrated its 25th anniversary earlier this month, and despite my heritage as a straight edge teen who cradled Minor Threat CDs in my Discman like an MRA cradles his ego, I felt compelled to attend, ready to project my existential crises onto a cannabis festival sharing my age. What self-serving insights could I glean from something that had also grown up during the Howard years and graduated into neoliberal deadlock? Was MardiGrass battling the pains of quarter-life crisis? Was I?
In truth, the history of Nimbin holds key clues to understanding much about our nation’s confused relationship with drugs, so it was with muted enthusiasm that I boarded the overnight Greyhound to Byron Bay. It’s afternoon on the first day of this three-day festival when I arrive, but the main strip is subdued. The organisers seem unfazed, however, explaining that a workday is a workday. Tomorrow is Saturday, when the fun will really begin.
It takes minutes to traverse the town centre, which spans a 250 metre stretch of road occupied by businesses flogging identical selections of toasted sandwiches, slogan T-shirts and drug paraphernalia. When I check into my hostel, I’m handed a laminated sheet outlining the house rules, one of which forbids drumming between 10pm and 8am. Surely those are the Real Drumming Hours? Let the people smash that mf bongo.
As promised, Saturday proves to be decidedly livelier. The pedestrian pace in town has slowed to a crawl as crowds inch past food truck queues and buskers, who jostle with face painters and dreadlock threaders for priceless sidewalk real estate. Every hippie cliché is on display here: denim-vested crust punks herding large, excitable dogs, hemp-clad environmentalists glued to the vegan stalls, barefoot doofers faithfully circling the rave tent.
The ultimate trope emerges as I loiter outside a café that morning in a desperate attempt to find reception. A man sidles up and hooks me with a line about the obscene waste of taxpayer money funnelled into policing the festival. I nod, eyeing the three riot cops standing a few metres away, who have so far only exercised their duties to look bored, and strut up and down the main street as Billie-Joe Armstrong would in a Green Day music video.
Slowly, our conversation turns to the ideological corruption of bipartisanship, of the parliamentary system as a whole, and before I know it, my mind is in freefall, somersaulting over the idea that I may have made a new – dare I say it – comrade. When it comes time to go our separate ways, he hands me a flyer.
After this incident, I begin to notice signs everywhere: beaming old men proclaiming the neurotoxicity of car headlights, pamphlets warning of chemtrails lying discarded in the gutter.
Not long after this unsettling encounter, I meet Clancy and Dane, two 25-year-old men from Byron Bay, for whom weed culture is nothing new.
They are passing through to support a friend running a medicinal marijuana stall, but are sceptical about legalisation, preferring to advocate decriminalisation. Seeing friends succumb to addiction is a story familiar to them both, but particularly for Clancy, who has sworn off pot. He grew frustrated with the groggy, clouded state he routinely found himself in after smoking and gradually drifted away from old friends who were forming the habit of smoking daily.
Clancy (left) and Dane.
Proclaiming the virtues of cannabis is the bread and butter of MardiGrass, so it’s no surprise the drug’s negative effects do not feature in the official agenda. But, it seems reluctance to acknowledging the psychological and social harm of drug dependence can be alienating to those who find the festival’s unchecked positivity reductive.
This certainly holds true for Zac, a 25-year-old filmmaker from Melbourne who believes harm minimisation, not legalisation, should be the primary focus of drug law reform.
“I have friends for whom smoking weed is a big problem, intimately connected to their mental health,” he tells me. “This doesn’t seem to be a point people are making here though. I guess that would mean recognising that sometimes weed can be really damaging, which is not the kind of thing you put on a placard at a pro-cannabis rally.”
The unspoken paradox on display here is that in many ways, Nimbin needs the state’s tough-on-drugs stance to survive. Without it, the illicit novelty of MardiGrass would crumble, and so too would the pillars of the town’s economy.
This is precisely why the war on drugs is a zero sum game—it cannot be lost or won. Like any single-issue platform, drug legalisation is not a miracle cure for capitalist ills. Improving access to adequate healthcare (especially in relation to mental health), childcare, housing, education and income support is a vital first step in fostering communities capable of withstanding the austerity currently pushing many into the depths of drug dependence.
The case for drug law reform is inseparable from the case for a robust welfare system. Malcolm Turnbull’s advice to the Australian public of “don’t do drugs” transcends moral paternalism. It is an admission that the Coalition fundamentally opposes the very idea of a strong social safety net, and indeed, is committed to further eroding existing social provisions, as shown by the welfare drug testing scheme proposed in the federal Budget.
Questions about what a drug-permissive society would look like remained largely unasked, but to fault the festival for its parochial politics is to misunderstand it. The resistance of MardiGrass lies embedded in its culture. For all its stoner stereotypes and commodified spiritualism, there is an earnest warmth to the spontaneous conversations struck up between strangers on the street, the joyful abandon of hundreds dancing to a drum circle in the middle of town, and the communal healing of enjoying oneself without fear or shame.
Bundjalung smoking ceremony.
MardiGrass shows us that the work of the drug legalisation campaign cannot rest solely in town hall debates or online petitions. Much of the gruelling, day-to-day labour of the movement rests in building connections and community, in humanising drug users and destigmatising addiction.
At 4:20pm on Sunday, in a fitting end to the festival, organisers released a huge inflatable joint into the air as thousands rushed to fill the main street, stopping traffic in their wake. With one hand blazing and the other reaching towards the sky, people came together, shoulder to shoulder, trading puffs, parading this strange, plastic cargo through town.
It was a glimpse of what community organising could achieve, and I couldn’t help but imagine this was the image of grassroots power Aquarius Festival sought to bring to life 44 years ago.
Photos: Xiaoran Shi.
